Maine voters may have the chance to upend the state’s utility landscape and send its two biggest players packing in November 2023.
Our Power Maine, a coalition pushing for a referendum to replace Central Maine Power and Versant Power with a nonprofit, consumer-owned alternative, announced on Monday that it has acquired the signatures necessary to get it on the ballot next year.
The initiative calls for creating a new utility called Pine Tree Power, which it says would be privately operated and controlled by a mostly elected board.
“The company’s purposes are to provide for its customer-owners in this state reliable, affordable electric transmission and distribution services and to help the state meet its climate, energy and connectivity goals in the most rapid and affordable manner possible,” the ballot question would state, if it’s approved by Maine’s secretary of state.
What’s not stated outright in the referendum question, but is a driving force behind the campaign, is that the utilities it aims to push out are some of the most unpopular in the country. In their respective categories in the J.D. Power 2021 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, CMP and Versant are dead last. Their customers also pay rates that are among the highest in the country.
“It’s this strange inequity where we get what is clearly the worst and least popular service in the nation and pay kind of a lot comparatively for that,” Andrew Blunt, executive director of Our Power Maine, said in a recent interview.
A group of three Maine economists wrote in an op-ed last year that the refinancing and replacement of CMP and Versant would save residents money right away.
Opponents say the initiative would be a costly one for the state.
Versant and CMP have fiercely opposed the initiative; Our Power says the utilities have spent $6 million fighting it. Other business interests in Maine are opposed too.
“This risky $13.5 billion proposal to take over our electric grid will create a tremendously volatile business environment in Maine for years to come,” Dana Connors, president of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. “Companies will be forced to think twice about investing in our state, and what do customers get in return? Higher rates, a debt three times the annual state budget, unaccountable politicians controlling the state’s critical infrastructure, and no guarantee of better service. Maine businesses depend on safe, reliable, affordable electricity, and we can’t afford to gamble that all away on this proposal.”
CMP parent company Avangrid (NYSE:AGR) has also funded an opposing campaign called No Blank Checks, which also collected signatures in an effort to force a statewide vote on any new government debt over $1 billion, which would apply to the utility buyout, although the exact cost to the state is under debate.
The consumer-owned utility proposal made it through Maine’s legislature in 2021, only for it to be vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills, who claims that her opposition was more about process and specifics of the legislation (which also would have put the question to voters) rather than the underlying idea of replacing the state’s incumbent utilities. (See Mills Tells Maine Legislature to Slow Down on Plan to Replace IOUs.)
“L.D. 1708, hastily drafted and hastily amended in recent weeks without robust public participation, is a patchwork of political promises rather than a methodical reformation of Maine’s complicated electrical transmission and distribution system,” Mills said at the time.